Your right hand and the pistol-butt protect your throat and a good deal of your face and head if you lower your face as much as possible.
Some men stand in the position of lunging in fencing, which makes a still smaller target of the body, but then this exposes them to a more raking fire, and a shot which would only pierce the thigh of the right leg, if the duellist were standing upright, might glance along the thigh and penetrate the abdomen if he were standing in a lunging attitude, but it looks more manly to stand perfectly erect.
A level-headed man would never agree to fight a duel unless he deemed it justifiable, and then most likely his whole attention would be concentrated upon killing his opponent, and considerations of personal safety would be neglected; in the same way that a steeplechase rider thinks only of winning and not of his personal safety—if it is otherwise he is no good as a cross-country rider.
As the great object is to hit an opponent before he hits you,—as, if he hits you first, even slightly, he may spoil your aim,—it is better to hit him as low as possible, provided the bullet strikes high enough to injure him.
It takes time to raise the pistol to the level of his head, or even of his armpit, whereas with practice you can flip the wrist up and hit him in the thigh or hip without raising the arm at all, and immediately after the word “Un.”
If you hit him in the thigh it would not be of much use in a serious duel, so the hip level is the point to try for.
An instance of perfect timing was that of a recent fatal duel where one man killed the other immediately after “feu,” before his adversary had time to raise his pistol.
In the report of a certain duel which took place in France recently several of the English papers made stupid jokes because one of the duellists did not fire his pistol (he placed it behind his back) at the word “feu.” The writers seemed to think he had forgotten to fire, because, when questioned as to why he did not fire, he answered, “J’ai oublié.” Of course any one conversant with duelling would have known that by acting thus he meant that he did not desire to kill or to wound his adversary. A good shot who for any reason did not wish to hit his adversary would always put his pistol behind him rather than shoot wide and get credit for making a miss. It is more dignified to do this, if one does not want to shoot an adversary, than to miss on purpose. Moreover, the latter act might be misconstrued into an attempt to kill.
By French law, if a man is killed in a duel, the body must be left where it fell and the police informed at once. The police then make an investigation. The adversary is arrested and tried subsequently at the Court of Assizes. He ought, of course, to stop by the body and give himself up. He and his seconds may be condemned to imprisonment.
Not wanting to kill an adversary is also the reason so many duels are bloodless. Men, in the heat of an argument, challenge each other. In cooler moments, they see that the cause of quarrel was not of sufficient importance to warrant their killing, or attempting to kill, each other. Yet neither likes to apologize lest this should look like cowardice; so the two exchange a shot, and both miss on purpose.